MY MOTHER WAS PARTICULARLY DUTIFUL WHEN IT came to the binding of my feet, though by the time of my birth, the custom was as antique and unfashionable as stone tools in our country. I believe she thought that if she could confine me to a litter for the remainder of my flower-strewn days, I would not be able to cause much mischief.
Every night I loosened the wrappings and crept from my bed to splash naked in the garden mud. I am sure she knew—after all, my hair was always damp and grass-scented in the morning—but she said nothing, swaddling my toes in raw silk with reproachful glances at my dirt-caked heels.
One year, when I was no more than ten or so, the fortune-teller Majo returned to the capital. This was a great event; though she would not have been received in polite society, her wares were greatly desired by all the ladies of rank. Love potions, spells for a safe childbirth or charms for a male child, talismans for luck and wealth, even incantations to change the weather from drought to rains. Her cart was a thing of wonder, shaped like a tiny, moveable house draped with purple and red cloths, green under-curtains and clanking silver chains, leather charms hanging like fringe from the miniature eaves, crane feathers and cat fur and unguents in clay pots issuing from its dark door. All this Majo carried on her back from town to town—though the shriveled, bony frame of the old Witch seemed hardly equal to the task. When she stopped, stilts unfolded from the bottom of the contraption, and Majo would release the straps that bound it to her to ply her trade.
After dusk, my mother and many other ladies with perfumed wigs and lacquered lips gathered in the pavilion like birds alighting on a fountain, squeaking in delight and waiting breathlessly for the telltale rattle of Majo’s cart. I was brought in my litter, resting on rose-colored pillows with my strangled feet propped up so that the blood would drain away from them.
Soon enough it came, singing its dilapidated song of pebbles underfoot and magic practical as cooking. The women pressed around, pushing their coins into Majo’s hazel-twig hands and pocketing their charms, their wishes, their scraps of paper to be placed beneath the pillow, their drafts to be swallowed at the next new moon.
Somehow, through the crush of rustling robes and greedy hands, Majo caught my eye with her beady black one. She had only one—the other had been lost somewhere along her travels, some said by a fight with a tiger, some said by a battle with a sorcerer; some even claimed to have scratched it out themselves when a spell had gone awry. The remaining eye clamped on me like a hand, and Majo’s spittle-strung lips parted into a smug little grin.
“What is your daughter’s name?” she croaked to my mother, without needing to ask which of the powdered ladies she was.
“My child is called Tomomo,” Mother answered, her voice quavering.
Majo clicked her tongue twice and produced a yellow pouch from her skirt, tossing it lightly in her hand. “Give her to me and I will give you this—keep it always next to your skin and it will produce one gold piece every time the cock crows.”
The women all caught their breath like fishermen snagging fat salmon and murmured among themselves enviously—after all, who cared about a useless girl-child in the face of all that gold?
My mother’s eyes flickered furtively from me to the old Witch. Finally, she agreed and snatched the yellow charm, scurrying back to the inner rooms with the rest of the women, full of this new wonder. She kissed me on the cheek and almost as an afterthought warned me to be careful. In a moment, Majo and I stood in the courtyard, alone, save for the marvelous cart.
She said nothing to me, but pulled a great copper pot from her cart and filled it with water from a pitcher so large I could scarcely believe she had concealed it in the folds of her skirt. When the ripples died down to nothing and the moon shone in the pot like a potato floating in soup, she indicated that I should look into it.
Of course, I saw there my true face, my snout thin and sharp, my moist black nose, my ears flicking curiously in the night wind. I suppose I should have been frightened; my fur was so red and my teeth were so bright. But truly, I was relieved—this was the thing my mother saw pacing behind my eyes. I was not wicked, simply a monster.
“There you have it, Tomomo, my girl.” Majo patted my back in a strangely congratulatory way.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“We know our own; we can smell it, the scent of fur under skin like sugar dissolved in tea.”
She leaned over my shoulder and her face floated beside mine in the water, a mangy wrinkled face with her one eye slashed out, her lower lip scarred and her jowls heavy as saddlebags. We grinned together, and our reflections bared their teeth, hers yellow and blunt, mine white and sharp.
“You belong to me now, little fox-girl. If I had known sooner, I might have spirited you away at birth and found a den for you in the mountains. Now, it is more complicated. You are much too old to join your cousins there. But it does not really matter so much—if you learn well, you may be able to find a place in the world, as I have. But be always wary of water—it reveals us.”
She poured out the pot onto the pebbles and packed it away into her cart, pulling wide leather straps over her shoulders and hoisting the miniature house onto her back. The wooden legs snapped up under its floor and Majo sniffed the wind.
“A fox must be always alert and wakeful,” she said sternly. “Now that you know that you are one, you have no excuse for this laziness. I have enough to carry without your thrice-damned sedan chair. Get those ridiculous things off your feet.”
Happily I ripped them off, chewing at the thick knots with my teeth. I nimbly walked alongside Majo with a heart so full and bright it threatened to burn through my robes.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I am taking you to a place where you can learn things. You have been sleeping on bedrolls soft as clouds lined in silk and feasting on fatted deer. But outside Palace grounds, deer are clever and hard to catch, and bedrolls are too heavy to carry. There are other ways of living, and on the whole, they make for better women. A pity your mother never slept on a cave floor with leaves for blankets—I hope she enjoys her prize. By morning, all the cocks in the capital will have dropped dead, dead as gold and daughters unwanted.”
I gawked, unable to imagine so many dead roosters, or how the bent old hag could have managed to leave a wake of strangled chickens behind her. But before I could ask, she was trundling away.
I kept pace, though not easily. She was surprisingly fleet for her age, and I began to understand how she could travel from city to city with such ease. Before long, we were deep into the forest, where bamboo was as thick around as a woman’s waist. Before much longer, I could smell the sea, faintly, and damp began to weight my hair. When the night had become cold and clear as pond ice, and we had reached a long beach which was softer underfoot than sweet cakes, Majo spoke again. Her voice was no longer rough and scabbed, but high and sharp, unsurprisingly like the bark of a fox calling to her kits.
“Well, here we are.”
“Where is it we’re meant to be?” I saw nothing but the long sea, and the breakers foaming white, and a slender pier stretching into the water like a skeletal finger.
Majo rolled her eyes. “A fox must be clever and self-sufficient. Put your educated mind to use and figure it out yourself. I brought you here; my part is finished. I am not a book; you cannot look up the answer in my index.” Majo shifted under the weight of her house. I stood there on the sand, nonplussed, trying not to look like a simpleton. She rolled her eyes. “You see the pier? It’s the only damned thing around, so why don’t you go see if anyone is living under it, hmm? Or shall I just do everything for you like your addle-brained mother?”
Majo released the cart straps from her shoulders and let the wooden legs unfold. She rummaged inside the hutch for a moment and drew out a thick cushion. Settling on it, she pulled a rice ball from her skirts and munched happily on it, gesturing towards the pier and urging me to get on with it. My cheeks stung as if switch-whipped. I would
certainly not be shown as a spoiled brat in Majo’s presence. I ran off after the rickety pier, tiny shards of seashell spraying up behind my pounding heels.
It stunk under the rotting slats. Algae and mussels and barnacles stuck to everything in wet clutches; old crab nets tangled in rusted-out clam buckets. I held my hand over my face and nearly gagged—few of those nets and buckets were empty of their last unfortunate victims. I saw nothing here which could be an errand worthy of Majo’s attention, and much that would not be worth the attention of even a starving seagull. But she was not wrong, I was sure; she could not be—and indeed, behind a well-chewed pillar, a dark shape scuttled by. I trudged towards it, my bare feet squelching in the tidepools and soggy sand, and soon I was knee-deep in the brine sea, splashing forward in the moonlight after a quick black shape.
“Wait!” I cried, and to my amazement the shape did stop, turning its sleek head back over its shoulder.
It was a large and well-fed otter. It rolled over in the waist-deep water and floated casually on its back, showing a wet golden belly against the rest of its slick, dark brown fur. Its face seemed friendly enough, if not exactly welcoming. Its whiskers were almost as thick as a mustache. In its paws was a large abalone with several bits of shell chipped off—the otter struggled with it, glancing up at me from behind its stubborn prize.
“What?” it said, and its voice rasped like dry kelp dragging over sand.
I didn’t at all know what to say. I was sopping wet and cold, and slime wriggled between my toes. I almost missed the swaddling bandages in all that muck. The pier water rippled around my thin robe as I stood like a child attempting to recite a poem she has not even tried to memorize.
“Majo sent me.” I shrugged, trying to look as though I conversed with otters every day. “I guess. I mean, I guess she sent me. She said to come to the pier, though it’s very dirty and I think a great many things have died down here.”
“No doubt,” said the otter, finally popping the shell open and ripping a thick piece of abalone flesh from the shimmering shell. “And each more delicious than the last.” It chewed hard for a good while on the tough meat before speaking again. “Well, if Majo sent you, I suppose we’ll have to make ends meet with a scraggly, skinny little fox, won’t we? No worse than most. I am Rakko, King of the Otters. If you haven’t brought me any shrimp or clams or such as tribute, I’ll just notch it down as owed.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to bow in the brackish water, “I didn’t know you were a King. I certainly would have brought something.”
“Well,” he said, paddling past me to one of the rusted buckets and fishing something foul and greenish from its depths, nearly tipping the bobbing pail over in his enthusiasm, “mainly I’m King because I said I was, and nobody said any different. But this pier is as good as any throne room, and there are riches in every cage and pot. That’s how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl—they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.”
“I see.” I nodded, and wondered if this was entirely how the King of my own country began. “Well, I’m not sure what Majo means for me to do—”
“What are foxes good for? She means for you to steal something for me. It’s not an easy thing. I hope you’re up to the task—she sends me girls from time to time, but they are usually far too frail for thieving.”
I blushed a little, thinking of my tiny feet, hidden by the sea.
“What is it you want me to get for you?”
Rakko looked up out of the buckets, his furry face suddenly quiet and sad, water dripping off his long whiskers like rain from stalks of wheat. He rubbed at his round brown eyes as if he had not slept since the sea was a puddle, and the moon pulled at dry land. “It’s not for me”—he sighed—“not for me at all, but I need you to steal a Star…”
I REMEMBER THE SPLASH MOST OF ALL.
Sekka and I were diving—Sekka is the Queen of the Loons. She taught me the trick of saying you were Queen. But where I’m King-Under-the-Pier and even bratty girls don’t bring me so much as an urchin as tribute, once Sekka said she was Queen, the other loons saw just how black her head was, how vast her wingspan—for poor Sekka was born larger than any other loon, and suffered a great deal for it when she was a chick—how white her belly, and how haunting was her wail and cry, and immediately agreed that she should certainly be Queen, and right away. Unfortunately, she found out that this is a pretty inferior way of becoming a ruler, because it usually means you have to add responsibilities into the bargain, and not simply many, many buckets of delicious rotted fish. Her nest is the thickest and best-thatched of all the seabirds, but she has to visit all the hens during mating season, and she tries very hard, but loons are heavy fliers at best, and she rarely makes the full rounds.
It was not mating season when the splash came. Loons and otters are alike in love of diving—we puff out all our air and make our stomachs quite flat, and swoop to the deep, cold currents where the fat fish fly. Sekka and I are the best divers you could imagine, should you spend your time imagining how gifted divers can be. We raced; we played; we fished. It was night, and thin blue light shafted through the water like anglers’ hooks. The shadow of a passing ship flittered through the water overhead.
Just as I shot past her to pry up a clam from a deep rock, the whole sea lit up as though the moon had been dropped whole into the water. The currents flashed suddenly bone white, and I saw Sekka’s shape flare purple against them, and my own tail was washed in it, and my eyes were burned. I rubbed at them furiously, and when I pulled my paws away the light was dimmed, and there was a small boy floating down from the surface, sinking terribly fast into the blue-black deeps.
We dove after him like one animal, our chests burning with air-need, dropping like two stones after the spiraling body. I do not know now, when I think back, why we thought it was so important to catch that near-dead thing before it slushed into the ocean floor, but without thinking, we would have drowned in the dive if it meant we could have stopped his fall. In the end, it was Sekka who caught him, snatching a lock of his hair in her dark beak. I stroked through the last inches of water to grip him around the waist, and we drew him up to the surface hanging between us like a net of salmon—and you know, he was so heavy, so heavy, I thought then he must have been filled with silver weights.
When our three heads broke through the waves, I pulled him up onto my belly like a scallop shell, and he lay there, limp, holding his head in his hands, as the night threw shadows on his skin. Finally, after a long silence which left Sekka and me fretting like new parents over him, he coughed, and spat water onto my fur. Moaning, he lifted his head, still clutched in his hands. I noticed two things right away: the first was that there was a thin line running all the way through his scalp and head, which oozed with a kind of wet darkness.
The second was that he had two faces where his ears should be, and nothing but smooth skin where I expected to look him in the eye. It was this skin which was split by the black line.
He held his head on either side, his hands covering his noses and foreheads, leaving his wet lips open, and stringy hair covered his hands. When he spoke, he used both mouths, in chorus with himself, one high, reedy voice, a child’s, and one low and grave, a man’s.
“I’m alive,” he croaked.
“Matter of opinion, little drowned dear,” clucked Sekka, who had already pecked at the black stuff on his faceless face and declared it horrid. It was not exactly blood, but it was not exactly not-blood.
“Sekka,” I said softly, “what do we do? Float him back to shore?”
She stretched out her long black wings to cover him, and the white spots on her feathers glittered like stars. “Little lost thing. Can you swim? Perhaps if you let go of your poor head—”
“No!” the boy cried, awkwardly shrinking from her and almost toppling into the water. Both his faces looked sheepish as he cl
ung to me with his elbows. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t let go, I mean.”
“What happened to you?” Sekka prodded, nuzzling his ribs as she would a chick with a broken wing.
“I fell.” He sighed.
I AM NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.
I wanted the world. Even after, even after, when they all went into the hills, into the ground, into the dark, when people opened up deep stone wells of forgetting in their bellies and all the Stars dove in, I stayed. No different from when I first took that step, that long step down from the black, I wanted the grass and the salt and the hard, round cheeses and the houses with tiled roofs and the beach with countless, countless sands. I was happy here; I didn’t want to pull brambles over my head and pretend I heard nothing of the world going by.
So I touched everything, everything I could reach, to leech the light out of me, to bleed out enough that I could pass for a thing that had never been a hole in nothing. I touched men and women and children sleeping in tamarack cribs, I touched cups and plates and bushels of roses, I touched haywains and haystacks and the thick doors of prisons, I touched the grass and the salt and the hard, round cheeses, I touched houses with tiled roofs, and I let the countless sands run through my hands until my skin no longer glowed.
But my faces, you will say. Surely no one would mistake me for a man.
And I say that we all chose that which was most like us, and I could not decide. I looked at the grass and the salt and they were nothing like me. I looked at the hard, round cheeses. I looked at the tile-roofed houses and I looked at the countless sands of the beach. Nothing matched me like one shoe to another.
The Orphan's Tales Page 28